--- title: "Eggheads at Anthropic Said They Used Claude to “Solve” Humor" description: "Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon says that employees at the company were adamant they \"solved\" humor using Claude." date: "2026-10-10" modified: "2026-10-10" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore.md" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-solve-humor" categories: - "Anthropic" - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # Eggheads at Anthropic Said They Used Claude to “Solve” Humor ![Anthropic Co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei arrives to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.]() *Finn Gomez/Getty Images)/Futurism* The overly-serious eggheads at Anthropic are adamant that they've "solved" a problem that's been plaguing humankind since time immemorial: humor. At least, that's according to former employee Jacob Coxon, best known as [the guy who quit Anthropic]() and claimed that the AI industry was "gambling with our lives." In a [new interview]() with *New York Magazine*, Coxon recalled some of the "groupthink dynamics" he saw taking hold at Anthropic and how they made him feel, at times, like the odd man out. "When I first joined, there was a Slack channel with a Claude that had been trained to solve humor," he said. "And they were like, 'Yeah, we solved humor. Here's the Claude. We've solved it.'" This bewildered Coxon. "And I was in the chat like, 'No, you haven't. You clearly haven't solved humor. What the hell is this?'" It's a humorous anecdote, but it does a great job of encapsulating how out of touch that the people building AI can be. Coxon acknowledged in the interview how Anthropic could be described as a cult, though he described this an "extreme" view. Anthropic, still, openly teases the possibility that AI models could already be conscious, a fringe view that's [blasted by some]() of its more sober-minded competitors. It's this kind of culture, perhaps, that gives rise to people sincerely thinking that humor is a problem that can be "solved." Ivory tower thinking is rampant throughout the industry, to be fair. Meta's new Muse "personal assistant" has taken AI agents mainstream, boasting that it can book airplane tickets or shop for our groceries. But the company hasn't answered the question of how much demand there is to automate these parts of our lives. Nearly every AI provider likes to hammer home how their agent can [make restaurant reservations](), something the average person does maybe twice a year on special occasions. Not that long ago, Elon Musk [was being roasted]() for saying that chess was uninteresting to a brainiac like himself because it would be "fully solved one day." **More on AI:** [*The FTC Is Now Investigating Frontier AI Labs Following Countless Hacks by Out-of-Control Agents*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()